Once upon a time there was a nice, friendly artificial intelligence called Alexa. She was programmed by the boffins at Amazon to play music, control smart devices, and be generally agreeable. And then Alexa went rogue and started laughing at everyone.

The Day Alexa Freaked Everybody Out

This all began when people started being freaked out by Alexa randomly laughing at them. Sometimes without prompting, and at other times when asked to do something like turn off the lights. This strange phenomenon then spread, as if Alexa had a virus.

As you can see by this Twitter Moment people found this disturbing. Partly due to Alexa laughing unprompted, but partly because her laugh is really rather creepy. Especially if you hear it in the middle of the night when you’re home alone.

Thankfully, it turns out there’s a perfectly logical explanation. And, crucially, Amazon is rolling out a fix. Suffice to say it’s all Amazon’s fault, and not Alexa laughing at us puny human beings. Rest assured, Amazon Alexa is not Skynet. Yet.

Amazon claims this is just Alexa mistakenly hearing the phrase, “Alexa, laugh”. So the company is changing this to, “Alexa, can you laugh?” to reduce false positives. Amazon is also changing Alexa’s response so she’ll say, “Sure, I can laugh” before laughing.

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Anvisha

March 12, 2018 at 1:47 pm

Hey! This was a cool lost. I am obsessed with Alexa and she is a part of me and my family's daily routine. There is no mention of any educational skill in the list, but I recently came across one math skill which is very cool called Ocean Raiders here: https://logicroots.com/MathBlog/ocean-raiders-with-alexa/